The first year was the easiest. It was in the second year that Lissa came perilously close to using again. In September 2010, a man hit her with a truck as she crossed the street near her apartment and dragged her body for ten yards before realizing what he had done. Lissa broke an ankle, her pelvis, and her left arm, and cracked five vertebrae in her neck. She spent weeks in a nursing home, where Irene and Madeleine visited, as did Bruce, her boss at the laundry. Micah rode his bike there after school or caught rides with men from the recovery group, until at last, against her doctors’ wishes, Lissa went home to the apartment.
She could not work and filled her days with other things, like journaling. On October 26, 2010, she wrote:
I have come to the conclusion that everything happens for a reason….Now that I am stuck in this wheelchair, I have one of two choices. I could whine…and get nothing done while feeling 100% miserable or shut up and use my time wisely to do all the things I always said I never had time to do. I think I will go with option #2. Get something done and try to figure out what exactly God wanted me to slow down for….I figure now I need to develop a plan, ie structure my time, prioritize my goals and recovery. Organize! Something my OCD loves to do.
She healed from the accident faster than her doctors expected. Even her children wondered at the speed of her recovery. “My mom is like a cat with nine lives, except her nine lives never run out,” Shauna said. Lissa did not deny it. How many times had she come this close to death? Accidents. Fights. The wrong cocktail of drugs. She supposed she was lucky, though at times this luck felt like a chain tethering her to life. Lissa had always believed she would die young and had lived with this in mind. Once, she had taken matters into her own hands and swallowed a bottle of pills, but a friend found her in a pool of her own vomit and delivered her to the hospital. Lissa called this attempt at suicide an “overdose” and described it in her journal like this:
The people that witnessed my overdose never really said anything to me about it except for Bart, one of my true friends. Not only was he the one who rescued me but he said I had better not ever do that again cause it traumatized him and then he died of an overdose a couple years later in Atlanta all by himself. Bart had left Minot because of warrants and to try to start anew elsewhere. It didn’t take him long to get back in the dope game. His girl, Jess, and their two babies went with. The dope took over and Jess returned to Minot….The story was that one day she got sick of Bart and his dope and got the kids ready, they went to the store and never returned. She took the bus back to North Dakota without telling him. One day Bart called me out of the blue. We were on the outs when he left Minot. He asked me if I would kill him if he returned. I stated that no matter what we would always be friends. He told me that he was coming back to be with the kids and Jess and could I pick him up on Monday 2 a.m. in Bismarck. I agreed. I received a call from his sister on Friday. Bart would not make the trip….They had his funeral instead on that Monday morning. I didn’t make it to the funeral.
When Lissa got bored of writing to herself, she wrote letters to friends she knew before she went to prison. In one, she admonished a man who had relapsed and gone back to treatment:
So you’re back in!? Wow! Figures. I know what you’re thinking. After October you’re done. Done!…No more bullshit, right? Well good for you! All I can say is that if you didn’t PLAN on fucking up anyway you wouldn’t have had anything to worry about. But oh well. As you can probably tell I’m disappointed. Nice of you to think about your friends let alone your kids before your addictions! ASSHOLE!
On the next page, she listed his options:
Productive happy sober life.
Dysfunctional addictive life with jail, institutions, cycle, or…
DEATH
When she reread the letter, she would wonder if she had written it for herself as well as for her friend. One day, as she sorted through her old belongings from the storage unit, she came across a quarter ounce of meth in a container buried beneath some papers. She kept it for three days and then dropped it in the toilet, watched the crystal soften into gel. For a moment, she considered fishing it out, shooting it up with the toilet water, but then her body began to quake. She flushed.
* * *
—
IN THE DISTANCE Lissa felt from her relatives—in the years after her release from prison, before she heard of Kristopher Clarke—she drew unexpectedly close to her oldest uncle, Charles Yellow Bird. Chuck, or “Chucky” as Lissa called him, was a year and eight months younger than her mother, Irene. He had spent much of his life in Denver and Albuquerque, where he worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Although not as accomplished as his older sister or his brother Michael, who were university professors, Chucky was, according to his siblings, the smartest of them all. He read endlessly, especially about history and politics. Once he had been offered a scholarship to a program at Harvard, which he turned down. As Michael would put it, Chucky was “driven only so far”; he wasn’t interested in “the old American Nightmare.” For a while, he lived at home in White Shield and taught art at the school, where he pushed for an Indian-led school board and founded a club called Arikara for Survival. Chucky had noticed that few young people knew their language, let alone their culture. He gathered elders, recording the stories they told. He wrote grants, pooling money for the club, and hired staff—Michael, whenever he was home from college, and Irene, who kept the books.
This was the Chucky his brothers and sisters bragged about: Chucky who saved the Arikara language. Chucky who liked to call his mother on the phone and say, “How’s my fat little Indian lady?” Chucky who loved books, Ford Mustangs, and playing pool. Chucky who loved music most of all and whenever he came home drove his Mazda 280Z right up to the house, blasting Rickie Lee Jones’s “Chuck E’s in Love.”
The Chucky Lissa had known when she was a child was different. After he left the reservation, she saw him only when he came home, and Chucky came home when he was having a hard time. Lissa remembered one particular summer, in 1984, when she had been living on Fort Berthold with her uncle Michael. One day, she and a friend took off around the state, stopping at powwows and sleeping on strangers’ floors. It had been late at night some weeks later when they came to White Shield. As they neared her grandparents’ house, they saw headlights coming fast on the dirt lane. A car pulled up. It was Chucky. He had a gun. “I’m going to blow your head off,” he said, and so they had skidded down the lane, dashed into the house, laid breathlessly on the cold enamel of the bathtub.
He could be violent when he drank, but with Lissa his tussles were more often abstract. He liked to tease younger kids to get their attention, calling out to them as they ran through the house. While Lissa’s cousins shied away from Chucky, Lissa had always quipped back. He challenged her to riddles. Some were logic problems he culled from books; others, questions he dreamed up about the world. Lissa did not solve his riddles right away. Often, days elapsed before she presented him with an answer. She would try to surprise him, offer it in passing as if the riddle had been too easy. Later, they admitted to each other that there was nothing amicable in this exchange. Chucky described it as “a battle of the minds” and took pleasure in stumping her.
So it surprised both of them when, after Lissa’s release from prison, they became close. In 2011, Chucky left Albuquerque and moved to his mother Madeleine’s house, where Lissa found him one day in the living room.
“Why are you moving home?” she said.
“What’s it to you?” Chucky replied.
“I think I have an idea.”
“What is it, then?”
“I think you came home to die.”
Chucky frowned, dark brows crowning his narrow eyes. He had been lost in the city for too long, Lissa thought, unmoored, alone to practice his addiction. He looked tired, like he had given up. Lissa told him so and crossed to a ba
y window where she had left her cigarettes.
They sat on the porch, looking south toward the lake. Chucky asked what she had meant. “You used to look impenetrable,” Lissa said. “Like you could shoot an arrow and it would bounce off you, but now I think it would kill you.”
Chucky said nothing.
“Well, you got cirrhosis now or what?” Lissa said.
“I’ve had cirrhosis. I’m in the later stage of cirrhosis.”
“You don’t think you can heal yourself?”
“Your mom and grandma are always trying to get me on medication, but I’d rather just go out like this.”
“Gee, Uncle, that’s kind of sad.”
“You say it like it is,” he said.
The next time Lissa visited White Shield, Chucky had slipped into a depression. He rarely came out of his room anymore. “What’s going on?” Lissa asked Madeleine, but her grandmother didn’t know. Lissa knocked on his door until he opened it. His bedroom was small, dim, cluttered with books and papers. She took a folding chair from a corner, set it between the bed and the wall, and reached for a book, flipping the pages mindlessly.
“I’m moving back to Denver,” Chucky finally said.
“For what?”
“They just don’t want me here.”
“Are you drinking again?”
“I’m a grown-ass man. I can drink.”
“Hey, I’m not the enemy here. Go ahead! I don’t have a problem with it.”
After that, whenever Lissa visited Madeleine’s, she went straight to Chucky’s bedroom. He did not go back to Denver. She often found him studying Article 25 of the Code of Federal Regulations, which defines the relationship between tribes and the U.S. government. From the look of it, the article would have taken a lifetime to decipher, with seven chapters, twenty-four subchapters, and hundreds of parts, not to mention an exponential number of subparts. It concerned, mainly, the management of Indian land from the enforcement of federal laws and regulations to the duties of federal officials in regard to reservation resources. The basis for the code was a series of treaties through which the U.S. had promised to act as “trustee,” furnishing tribes and members with the necessities it had stripped from them when it stole their land. These included food—no longer annuities, but commodity programs—and education, housing, and law enforcement. According to the code, the federal government held Indian land “in trust,” which meant that if a tribe or individual wished to use their land—build a house, dig a well, run cattle, drill for oil—they needed approval from the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
Chucky had spent his career working for the Bureau, and yet he distrusted the arrangement. He knew how federal agencies lost titles, sold land out of the tribe, paid leasing fees to the wrong landowner or to no landowner at all. He had sued the government himself, but although he knew the law better than most, he had been left near the end of his life with some philosophical questions: Who, really, owned Indian land? And what did “tribal sovereignty” mean if federal agencies determined the land’s fate?
Lissa and Chucky parsed these questions and then turned to others. They discussed the U.S. debt to China, wars in the Middle East. They indulged in conspiracy theories. Their riddles lost their hard edges, and they took pleasure in each other’s company. This was how Lissa would remember her uncle after he was gone: Chucky at his desk, she in the folding chair, sifting aloud through the strange logic of the world. He was her proof of intellect, confidence that her mind had not dulled in their years apart—and still, there was no denying that Chucky was the brightest Yellow Bird.
He died on December 6, 2011, eleven weeks before Kristopher Clarke disappeared.
* Five first names in this book are pseudonyms: Irene, Madeleine, Paul, Candace, and Caitlin.
2
Missing
AFTER LISSA WROTE TO CLARKE’S mother on June 2, 2012, she heard nothing. June passed. Then, July. In early August, Lissa drove to the Spirit Lake Indian Reservation, 150 miles northwest of Fargo, where she danced in her first sun dance, an annual religious ceremony that originated among tribes in the Great Plains. Before prison, Lissa never had any interest in traditional ways; it was after she got out that she became curious. Though her family was Catholic, they had not abandoned their ways entirely, and if a relative fell ill, they often asked medicine people to pray at the bedside. One day, while visiting an aunt in the hospital, Lissa met a Lakota man whom her mother had summoned to hold a ceremony. The man invited Lissa to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, where he lived, and after that, Lissa made frequent trips. He taught her how to prepare for sun dance, how to pray, how to fashion a medicine pipe from red pipestone. One of Lissa’s uncles, who worked as a Native American commissioner for the city of Fargo, helped secure a small plot of municipal land on the outskirts of the city to erect a sweat lodge. Soon Lissa was attending several nights a week, bringing her son Micah along and arranging for inmates at her old halfway house to attend as well. After the sweat, they gathered in lawn chairs around a firepit, drank water, and ate sloppy joes. Now, wherever Lissa went, she was ready for ceremony. In her car, she kept a suitcase packed with tobacco, eagle feathers, medicine wheels, inserts for her moccasins, bitterroot for her throat when it got sore from singing, a knife, dresses she sewed herself—applying a skill she had gained in prison—and scalpels and hemp thread, which she used to pierce her shoulders under the skin, stitching to her body the feathers and medicine wheels that were torn from her during the sun dance. The dance lasted four days, through which Lissa consumed no food or water. Suffering, she was learning, could be a gift, and flesh the only thing that belonged to her, that she could give of her own body.
On August 11, 2012, the day Lissa returned to Fargo from Spirit Lake, Clarke’s mother, Jill Williams, replied. “I just need info,” she wrote. Perhaps Lissa could “ask around” on the reservation. She should be careful though, Jill warned: “Someone around there is responsible for KC’s disappearance and I don’t want to put anyone in danger.”
Lissa knew from Jill’s original plea that the last her son had been seen was at the trucking company offices where he worked, in a segment of the reservation called Mandaree. Fort Berthold had six segments, drawn up after the flood. White Shield made up the east segment, Twin Buttes the south, and Mandaree the west, while Four Bears, New Town, and Parshall spread from west to east across the north. On the twenty-fourth of August, a Friday, Lissa drove with Micah and Obie to White Shield and spent the night at her grandmother’s house. The next day, she continued to Mandaree. Across a bridge over the lake, the land scrunched like a dry blanket, where the flatness of the prairie gave way to badlands, to canyons cut by seasonal creeks. Red clouds hovered over the grass—dust devils, Lissa thought at first, but when she looked closer, she saw that they were the billowed wakes of trucks. There were roads where she had never seen roads before, curving through pasture like suburban culs-de-sac. Even the contours of the land had changed, cliffs cut, hills reshaped, as if giants had pressed their fingers into clay.
It was her first sight of the oil boom. She had heard about it from relatives—about a man who came by her grandmother’s house promising bonuses if Madeleine signed. That had been in 2007, while Lissa was in prison. The man happened to be Madeleine’s nephew, hired by an oil company called Dakota-3 to persuade his fellow tribal members to lease their mineral rights. By the time Lissa was paroled, every scrap of land on the reservation had been leased, and the first oil wells had been drilled.
The land Madeleine leased out was in Mandaree, across the lake from White Shield. It was a small share she had inherited from her father, Ben Young Bird, upon his death. Ben was Hidatsa. Before the flood, people crossed the Missouri freely by three bridges connecting towns on either side, but after the bridges were submerged, the distance became vast, irreconcilable. Arikara families moved to White Shield, Hidatsa families to Mandaree, and
after that, Madeleine rarely saw many of her Young Bird relatives. Even when a bridge was rebuilt in 1955, connecting Four Bears to New Town, those living in the southernmost segments—White Shield, Twin Buttes, and Mandaree—crossed the reservation less often, the drive being one to three hours.
Madeleine had never seen her land before she leased it to the oil company. When she later heard that the leases were sold to a different company for a higher price than the one her nephew offered, she regretted having leased the land at all. Her check had been small. It had shouldered the weight of grocery and electricity bills, and then, as easily as it had come, it was gone. When Lissa heard her relatives brag, “We got oil on our rez,” she struggled to believe them. The boom had hardly touched White Shield. Mandaree was different, she knew, and still, Lissa had found it difficult to believe the rumors circulating on the reservation. Some Mandaree families, people said, were collecting hundreds of thousands of dollars a month. “Are you serious about that?” she challenged her relatives. “When do Indians ever get their due?”
But now here it was: the boom. Lissa could not deny it. Roads, dust, trucks, rigs. And flares, too many to count, shooting from pits and tall metal pipes, the air shimmering with heat.
The road dipped into another canyon, the flares disappearing from sight. Here the land looked as it had before, broad and unmarked. She passed a pale-yellow house where an aunt and uncle lived and thought of stopping for a visit. Then, remembering why she had come, Lissa continued on.
Some miles past the canyon, the road forked west toward Watford City and south toward Mandaree Village. On a far corner were the trucking offices, larger than Lissa had expected. They were a metal building with few windows, a garage tacked to the side. Vehicles had lined up by what appeared to be a main entrance, and semitrucks were scattered in the yard. There were workers everywhere, most of them white, lying beneath trucks, climbing in and out of cabs. Lissa parked at the edge of the yard, hoping someone would notice her, but no one did. When a worker came near, she called out to him.
Yellow Bird Page 4
